DAVID LEVINE (1926 2009) Jules Feiffer with cigar

Sale 2673 - Lot 1

Price Realized: $ 2,375

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500

DAVID LEVINE (1926-2009)
Jules Feiffer with cigar. Unpublished caricature illustration, 1983. Ink on paper. 9 x 9 1/2 (image) in 15 x 19-inch frame. Signed in lower right image.

Provenance: From the collection of Jules Feiffer.

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Feiffer Commentary: In the second half of the 20th century David Levine was the most important literary and political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art. When I was in the army. I met a Brooklyn painter, Harvey Dinnerstein, who was stationed with me, and we became close friends. He was part of a gang of Brooklyn painters, which included David. All of these guys were serious painters, but David was the only one among them, who was a cartoonist and a cartoon fan. The first thing David wanted to talk to me about was whether I knew a comic strip by a man named Sheldon Mayer called "Scribbly the Boy Cartoonist". I was a huge fan of his, and when David brought him up, we started talking about Scribbly, and that was the connection that we both made with each other and we became lifelong friends.
In 1963, Bob Silvers had asked me to be the New York Review of Books staff artist but I could not be involved with them because I was not going to leave the Village Voice. But did they know the work of David Levine? David had these spot drawings in Esquire at the time, along with his oil painting and watercolors. David started from almost the first issue of the New York Review of Books and became the visual signature of it, so that that you could not you could not look at that paper without thinking of David. He understood, in a way I never could do in a single drawing, how to make a socio-political, literary point and that would be the only way you could ever look at that person after that.

I don't think this work has ever been published. It was a birthday gift to me.